Is Matlab Fast Enough For Accurate Simulation Of New VAWT Turbines Like This?

We want to work on problem of designing and simulating new "rotating wing" VAWT Wind Turbines like example in this short video: SPINNING WING VAWT YOUTUBE 1) Is Matlab code run fast enough to model something like this in realtime? 2) This will be too slow for CPU so can Matlab easily use power of GPU to accelerate calculations? 3) Are there good example project for Matlab which handle combined aerodynamics and mechanics problem?

[Walter Roberson]

please keep in mind that MATLAB only supports Nvidia GPUs, but that the majority of Nvidia GPUs run double precision at only 1/32 or 1/24 of the single precision rate. Some Nvidia models are able to run double precision at 1/8 of the single precision rate, but you have to choose your device very carefully.

Do you need double precision or is single precision good enough for this purpose? We do not know. VAWT failure modes come about due to an accumulation of stresses, and single precision floating point model failure modes come about due to an accumulation of round-off errors, but we do not know whether those issues reinforce each other or cancel out or are neutral. A lot would depend on implementation.

Answer 1

[John D'Errico]

Is it fast "enough" How fast is fast enough? Odds are you will never be happy. A small model that might be fast enough will not be accurate enough for you. And we cannot possibly know how accurate you think you will need any prediction. A large enough model will never be as fast as you want, especially if written by someone without seriously good coding skills.

I'll predict you will not be happy, no matter how fast the code proves to be. Sorry.

Of course, you can just accept that any model is as fast as you can make it, that a complicated model like that is probably the stuff of doctoral theses, if you were to go deeply enough into the fluid dynamics modeling with a dynamical structure involved, etc. So you build as good of a model as you have the ablity to model it. No model is ever perfect anyway.

The only truly good model of a cat is just a cat, and the very best model is the same cat.

(This mis-quote goes back to either Norbert Weiner or Arturo Rosenblueth, maybe further back in various incarnations.)